Apart from the three Peaks of Lavaredo that will appear for a few seconds in Ron Howard’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story”, the second spin off from the Star Wars saga, the world premiere of which will be presented by Disney out of competition on La Croisette, South Tyrol comes to the 71st Cannes Film Festival with “In my room”, a film directed by Ulrich Köhler (Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale 2011 with “Sleeping Sickness”), which is in competition in Un Certain Regard.
In fact the film was partly shot in South Tyrol (in Laives, Colle Isarco and Bolzano) taking advantage of the support provided by the South Tyrol Fund for cinema and television productions amounting to € 300,000.
This is announced with satisfaction by Renate Ranzi, head of the IDM Film Fund & Commission together with Birgit 
Oberkofler, underlining that the film is co-produced by South Tyrol’s Echo Film along with Germany’s Pandora Film.
An apocalyptic – fantasy film, “In my room” is a story about Armin, a freelance professional dissatisfied with his life, who wakes up one day to discover that he is the last man on earth; he is forced to start again from scratch. Living in a wooden hut and dedicating himself to cultivating the fields, he ends up feeling at home for the first time ever.
Not science fiction but rather a strategy directed towards the future (in the sense of progress), is the vision of the IDM Film Fund & Commission, that Renate Ranzi, head of Film Location Development, renders in a pliable way with the image of a film planet around which other creative and production sectors gravitate.
One project in three phases: “To develop South Tyrol as a production venue, supporting the growth of creative teams (directors, scriptwriters, producers), professionalizing the region in order to be able to offer external productions all the services that could be useful to them (equipping itself with at least two film crews), utilizing the Film Fund’s potential also for sectors adjacent to the creative industry like design, architecture and craft”.
This third phase also includes the creation last January, inside the IDM (which is the public company dedicated to economics and regional development), of a new department complementary to the Film Commission: Ecosystem Film & Creative Industries, of which Renate Ranzi is the manager.
The objective is to consolidate the creative economy and increase its competitiveness, implementing the guidelines expressed by the European Union according to which each region should specialize in its own strengths (RIS 3). As emerges from the study “Io sono cultura” [I am culture], conducted by the Fondazione Symbola, South Tyrol is the second region in Italy in terms of the growth of the economic-employment spin off from cultural and creative industries: in the last 5 years it has registered an increase of +7.2 % compared to +0.8% in the whole of Italy.
“At Ecosystem Film & Creative Industries,” explains Ranzi, “we started off with two projects, commencing with the mapping of the region that we are carrying out in collaboration with the University of Bolzano and the EURAC Research center: we have to understand where we are and build a solid data base for making targeted interventions and defining the priorities”.
“At the same time”, she goes on, “we have extended our objective by taking part in the European project “Regional Creative Industries Alliance – RCIA”, where 8 European regions discuss good practices, instruments and financial measures, directing this knowledge towards the specific requirements of their own region”.
Ecosystem’s work has only just begun, but already it is becoming clear what role cinema and, more in general audiovisuals, can play in what the director of the Development department of IDM, Hubert Hofer, has defined as the “intelligent specialization” (and, thus, the growth), of the region. The setting is the NOI Techpark Technological Park where, since the end of last year, both the South Tyrol Film Commission and Ecosystem Film & Creative Industries have ben based.
